Spotlight indexing takes days and has high CPU

[Dingens]

Hey

Spotlight wouldn't show my Apps anymore, so I started to reindex. Now it has been on it for more than three days and the fans are on, the CPU und RAM looks like this:

Any ideas? I tried to reboot, but it stays the same. I tried to stop and start again using the terminal, but still the same.

Latest Sequioa, M1 pro CPU, about 600 GB Data.
Spotlight works reasonably well, but still does not display any programmes.
Thanks

Rolf

 

[racerhomie]

Try this. Disable spotlight by preventing it from Indexing Entire Drives. Search will return nothing. Then restart your Mac. Then remove the drive from the indexing prevention list. It will force the process

 

[Dingens]

Thanks
I tried this before using Terminal, but it wouldn’t allow me to add the main drive, for „an unknown reason“.
something is strange…
Cheers
Rolf

 

[racerhomie]

Thanks
I tried this before using Terminal, but it wouldn’t allow me to add the main drive, for „an unknown reason“.
something is strange…
Cheers
Rolf

Use the UI from System Settings. I have had some success on Ventura when some indexing would drain the battery. Also try First Aid from Disk Utility on your Drives first

 

[Dingens]

Use the UI from System Settings

That's what I did.
The error message comes up:

It says due to an unknown error the object could not be added or removed.

Will have a look at the disk utility.
Cheers
Rolf

 

[!!!]

That is not normal, Spotlight should not use that much RAM. There is something wrong with spotlight and it is not indexing correctly.

I recommend you remove the .Spotlight-V100 folder from the root of the drive and then restart. Something is corrupt.

 

[Dingens]

Hi!
Update: It seems to be working again, at least everything is being indexed normally. What helped: ChatGPT.
It took half the day, but everything is being indexed properly now.
All attempts to delete the index and rebuild it via Terminal failed. There were messages such as: Spotlight Server not running, and even a recovery via the boot menu did not solve the problem. When searching for indexed items with

mdfind -count 'kMDItemKind == "*"'

, there were only 282 items found:

That's definitely not enough .
What seems to have worked now:
Delete in Safe Mode and restart:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

sudo chflags -R nouchg,noschg /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100

sudo find /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100 -mindepth 1 -exec rm -rf {} +

sudo shutdown -r now

Then in normal mode:
Check if everything is working:

pgrep -fl mds

pgrep -fl mds_stores

Then:

sudo mdutil -i on /

sudo mdutil -E /

mdutil -s /

Then a small function test:

mdfind -count 'kMDItemKind == "*"'

echo canary > ~/Desktop/spot-canary.txt; sleep 10

mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop 'kMDItemFSName == "spot-canary.txt"'

Then you can see whether the number of indexed items increases (I now have 65,000 instead of 282), the index bar in Spotlight grows slowly (it wasn't there before) and it also finds the test file.
And indeed, Spotlight now finds the programs again and the index is growing again.
Fingers crossed that it will be done by tomorrow.

Thank you for your help and suggestions!

Cheers!
Rolf

 

[Fishrrman]

From the very first release of spotlight (years ago), I've turned it off and have never re-enabled it.

For better searching, I use the small and FREE tools named:
- EasyFind
and
- Find Any File.

Works for me.

 

[Dingens]

Glad it’s working for you. I use it as a launcher, just type the beginning of the app name, enter, done.